Art Garfunkel Sings a Carnegie

TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers.

About the Archive

This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them.

Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions.

“I can't say I don't miss Paul Simon,” Art Garfunkel remarked when he was called out for an encore after his Friday night performance at Carnegie Hall. “I must say, it took me about eight years to get this particular act together.”

During the heyday of Simon and Garfunkel, Mr. Garfunkel often seemed to be the duo's lesser half. After all, Mr. Simon wrote the songs, Mr. Garfunkel only sang the high harmony. But Friday's concert revealed something his rather conventionally produced solo albums have only hinted at. During the last eight years or so. Mr. Garfunkel has become an original and, compelling song stylist and an understated but remarkably musical vocal technician.

In fact, Mr. Garfunkel's vocal performance on Friday was virtually flawless. He has always had an unusually pretty tenor, and perhaps it was always capable of more than Paul Simon asked it to do. But Mr. Simon did not really start to blossom as a songwriter or a performer until the duo disbanded, and one suspects that the breakup was also an incentive to Mr. Garfunkel. In any event, he is no longer just a pretty voice. He has the rare ability to put a song over with a maximum of feeling, a minimum of fuss, and an admirable control of pitch, timber and phrasing. He may not be ready for any spectacular interval jumps or other vocal bravado, but no one could ask him to do more with the considerable gifts he does have in hand.

The songs Mr. Garfunkel is singing these days cover a fairly broad spec trum from the works of contemporary craftsmen like Stephen Bishop and Jimmy Webb to standards and occasional rock oldies to Simon and Garfunkel hits. These last are the least successful. One supposes Mr. Garfunkel has to sing them, but in the old days Mr. Simon had a rather incurable weakness for dangling images and cuteness. “The Sound of Silence” is pretty silly song, after all, and Mr,

Simon's adaptions of folk themes were not that much better.

But with simple, intelligent arrangements for various combinations of guitar, piano, cello, percussion and backing voice, and with his evidently good intentions, Mr. Garfunkel at least made these hoary folk‐rock evergreens palatable. His may not be the most profound sort of pop music, but it is pop of a very high caliber musically speaking, and his performance at Carnegie Hall must be considered genuine triumph; no matter that it was a long time coming.

Dan MI, who opened Mr, Garfunkel's show, was not half as convincing: He is one of those singer-songwriters who make such a fetish of being friendly, unaffected and sincere that one has to suspect them of insincerity. Add to this an overdose of the sort of sensitivity that causes performer to suspend his guitar accompaniment under particularly tremulous lines and you have the kind of artist who leaves this listener cold. On the plus side, Mr. Hill writes some pleasantly pretty pop songs, especially when he is furnishing lyrics for tunes by people as gifted as Barry Mann.